Navigating the wilds of parenthood

Get Your Poppy Payments Reimbursed Through Your Dependent Care FSA

Many employers offerDependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts(often referred to as a Dependent Care FSA) as a benefit. It’s a way to earmark pre-tax dollars, so you can put those funds toward childcare. For those of you who are taking advantage of this benefit, did you know that Poppy spending is often an eligible expense?

Poppy makes it super easy to download a history of your charges as a PDF, so you can submit it to your(likely pretty old-school) FSA provider.

Step 1: Log into your Poppy Account

Step 2: Go to the main menu and select“Bookings”

Step 3: Scroll to the bottom of your bookings to“FULL YEAR BOOKING SUMMARY”

What’s a Dependent Care FSA?

Poppy is not the expert on this — we just focus on providing amazing childcare! Here’s what we do know:

Every little bit helps when it comes to covering childcare, we’ve all felt that. There’s so much American companies and law makers could do to help lighten the load, but there actually is an existing U.S. benefit that can help a tad with caregiver expenses…. and it is shockingly undersold and under-utilized.

About 70% of companies offer this benefit, but only a tiny fraction of employees sign up, and even among those signed up, a lot of people don’t submit the claims to get that money back.

Many employers offer“Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts”(often referred to as a Dependent Care FSA) as a benefit. It’s a way to earmark pre-tax dollars, so you can put those funds toward childcare. If you’re familiar with Health FSAs then you probably can make some guesses on how this works, but because there are many options for childcare, it’s currently a very manual, pretty annoying process.

The catch is that super-busy parents, and you forget to submit those claims by the deadline… the money goes away. Poof.(You do typically have a grace period after the end of the year).

Many companies are actually now in Open Enrollment Season, so it’s a good idea ask whoever manages benefits if they offer a Dependent Care FSA and how you might enroll for it. If your company needs some education on the Dependent Care FSA, two companies we know of that offer managed programs are Gusto and Kinside.

P.S. Poppy also often partners with Seattle companies to offer Poppy as a benefit to their employees, so feel free to put them in touch with us at hello@meetpoppy.com